Did you know your taxes aren’t due on April 15 this year? It’s true. April 15 is a Sunday, so like many banking activities, the due date slides to the next day. That’s not all, though. Because of a special holiday in the District of Columbia - Emancipation Day - April 16 is also not an OK due date. So this year, our income taxes are due on April 17. An extra two whole days to do our taxes - just what we need!

Whether you’re doing your taxes using tax software or by hand, going to a tax preparation service or having your accountant do them, you may have questions and special situations and not know how to handle them. Luckily, the IRS has a website that offers more information and publications and forms than you could ever want or need. (Unless you do this for a living, of course.)

I’ve talked about tax preparation services and tax preparation software, but what if you just want to do it yourself, the old-fashioned way? Used to be, you could get the forms you needed at the library or the Post Office, and fill it out by hand. No more. So where can you get the forms you need?

You’ve seen or heard the ads for these tax preparation services - you can go in, they’ll walk you through doing your taxes and even give you your refund up front. Sounds like a great deal, right? Well, you know what they say about things that sound too good to be true. Check the fine print: you have to pay quite a bit of money for them to essentially fill out the forms in the software for you (you provide the answers, after all), and don’t think you’re getting that quick refund for free, either. For the benefit of getting your refund on the same day, you of course have to pay. And why would you do that, if you could wait another two or three weeks and get your entire refund instead of only part of it?

When I get ready to do my taxes each year, I don’t go to a tax accountant or download forms off the IRS website. Instead, I buy TurboTax and enjoy the pleasure of doing it myself with the ease of not entirely doing it myself.

Tax time is looming. You’ve started gathering your papers together. But then what? Well, there are four basic choices, and I’ll give an overview of those here, and talk about them in more detail in later blogs.

Your Accountant

(This is part 2. Don’t forget to check out part 1, too: Tax Preparation: Get Your Tax Papers Together, Part 1).

Before you start doing your actual taxes, make sure you’ve got everything you need. Even if you decide to use a tax preparer rather than doing them yourself, you’ll still need to do this step.

Before you start doing your actual taxes, make sure you’ve got everything you need. Even if you decide to use a tax preparer rather than doing them yourself, you’ll still need to do this step.

Today, get together all of the following income-related papers, if they apply to you. You might have only one or two of these, or might have many of them.